First- order versus unconventional phase transitions in three-dimensional dimer models

Abstract

We study the phase transition between the Coulomb liquid and the columnar crystal in the 3D classical dimer model, which was found to be continuous in the O(3) universality class. In addition to nearest neighbor interactions which favor parallel dimers, further neighbor interactions are allowed in such a manner that the cubic symmetry of the original system remains intact. We show that the transition in the presence of weak additional, symmetry preserving interactions is first-order. However the universality class of the transition remains continuous when the additional interactions are weakly repulsive. In this way, we verify the existence of a multicritical point near the unperturbed transition and we identify a critical line of unconventional transitions between the Coulomb liquid phase and the $6-$fold columnar phase.

added supplementary material; changes throughout the manuscript (to appear in Phys. Rev. Letters)

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• The "Coulomb phase" in frustrated systems
• Phase diagram of an extended classical dimer model
• Higgs transitions of spin ice
• Critical behavior in the cubic dimer model at nonzero monomer density
• Thermodynamics of the classical spin-ice model with nearest neighbour interactions using the Wang-Landau algorithm
• Slater and Mott insulating states in the SU(6) Hubbard model
• Confinement of monopoles and scaling theory near unconventional critical points
• Universal monopole scaling near transitions from the Coulomb phase
• Synchronization transition in the double dimer model on the cubic lattice
• Neel-VBS phase boundary of the extended J_1-J_2 model with biquadratic interaction
• Dynamic scaling theory for a field quench near the Kasteleyn transition in spin ice
• Short-time critical dynamics in the classical cubic dimer model
• Deconfined criticality for the two-dimensional quantum S=1-spin model with the three-spin and biquadratic interactions